Thanks for the responses particularly Pilou it looks good but i'm not ready for such a big investment. I think the answer may lie in photoshop. I just hoped there would be something more automated.

Sketchup "Make" ...i still have a laugh when i read this name

Thanks Box, that is exactly right. It depends on which way you draw the line.

I just glued a bit of wood with a nut in it onto the bottom of the mouse so that it screws onto the monopod fitting. Good strong industrial Velcro would probably be all you need. You could open it up and glue a nut inside so that you can screw it off and use it normally if you want. I've no idea what the difference is, I simply picked the first link in google images for monopod. It's basically a telescopic stick. A length of broom stick would be just as good and a damn sight cheaper, but not as transportable and professional looking. The glove is brilliant, I use it all the time. The connection is strong, easy to attach and detach. I felt the same about the cable at first then realised that, if it was wireless, every time I went to the kitchen to make a coffee or picked up a tape measure I would have to not touch my fingers together or my computer would be going nuts. It's a very good on off switch. It's very durable, washable and hasn't given me any problems. If you use lots of keyboard shortcuts with your digital art you will find it very useful. It's not cheap though.

The tiny facets failing to form issue is down to SketchUp's built-in tolerance. Every modeling application must have such settings, because calculating the numbers used for points will inevitably result in some numbers that are not exactly identical BUT ought to be considered identical. Otherwise you'd snap to a vertex and the application would recognize the existing vertex point and the snapped point as being almost identical, but not quite, if there even a zillionth of an inch difference in one value from the Maths... So the tolerance used is a thousandth of an inch. SketchUp works in inches even when the Model Units are say mm. The 'displayed units' are just for user's convenience. Edges less that ~0.25mm will therefore often fail to form as the two vertices forming the tiny edge's ends are deemed to be coincident, and you can't make a 0 length line ! Without the missing edge a face can't get made because it needs a continuous loop and the tiny gap thwarts that ! I expect that 1/1000" was chosen because SketchUp is intended for modeling buildings and their parts, furniture etc, and 1/1000" is far more accurate that you'll ever need. With the advent of 3d printing and related solid-modeling many parts are smaller, and/or modeled to an accuracy that was never originally envisaged when SketchUp was first developed. Therefore, if you model at x100 or x1000 you should avoid the tiny face issue. Set your Model Units to meters, at 3dp without any length snapping or unit display set. Now model.... typing in 10 as if it were mm, when it's actually 10m... Never add a units suffix to your input. When your modeling is finished and saved, draw a line 10 long, then use the tapemeasure tool and pick the two ends of that line, the VCB says 10.000, immediately type 10mm [note the units suffix mm]... and answer Yes when asked if you want to scale the model. It now shrinks by 1/1000 - Change your Model Units to mm. All really tiny facets will continue to exist; as was said they can exist it's their initial creation that is the issue.

Some folks like to use a Wacom tablet and some like the fancy mice with lots of buttons. I've tried running SketchUp on my Cintiq and with several different fancy mice. The fancy mice are in their boxes and the Cintiq is reserved for other things like photoshopping drawings. I like my inexpensive 3-button mice for drawing in SketchUp. When it comes down to it, the tools in the program are all just single point sorts of things. You draw an edge or click on something. For my money the CMB coupled with Shift work just fine for navigating around the model.

Do you know about groups and components?

Guys this does not show up at Sketchucation Plugin Store, though it's a great plugin! Shouldn't it be there? Best regards, JQL

I sent you a private message Chris.

@numerobis said: @anatolesketchucation said: ...6 core, 16go, 2go graphic card... sorry, but the 2GB doesn't say anything about the speed of the card. And do you mean a "real" Intel 6-core or an AMD? Maybe you can post your specs to see if it can be improved. And the model size (polys/MB) would also be helpful... Yeah 2gb doesn't help the speed but I think it can work better on big model. Which specs you want ? My computer ? intel i7 3930K@4.2 ghz (6 cores, 12 threads) 16 gb ddr3 GTX 670 Evga 2gb the size of the model is 28.1 mo

Mac, I couldn't get your link to work, but changing the filetype to PDF worked...like this (PDF download): http://www.stratasys.com/~/media/Main/Secure/White%20Papers/Rebranded/SSYS-WP-AccuracyMyth-03-13.pdf

thanks elisei! joint push pull is ok!

you may want use our tool BackUp Prefs v1.12 (Win only) for saving/restoring the SU 8/7/6 prefs to a file (no malware, no adware, no installation). [update] version 1.14 updated for being compatible w/ SU v2013/2014 [/update] hth, Norbert

@jaceguay Thanks for your input. I noticed when it opened up just before it crashed it would show a file window for a quick instant. I could never see it because it went so fast, but I used my phone and took a slow motion movie and was able to see the file name. Next I renamed the file so it wouldn't open it up, but it still opened up a window. I did my slo-mo trick again and found that somehow it was opening up the renamed file! I moved it to my desktop, and finally Sketchup is working fine again. Interestingly enough the file opened fine with a Windows version of Sketchup, but not on my Mac. I'm going to have someone who knows more about the program than I do take a look at it on his Windows PC to see if he can find anything wrong with it... Interesting stuff....

You could try it with advaced camera tools. There you get models of your cameras so that you can scale them with the model i think.

You normally model in Monochrome mode and then apply materials to the forms. So having a neutral color for the right-way-round faces seems a sensible choice. A bright back color shows up anyway. There is a FixReverse... tool that reverses incorrectly 'colored' faces, even if their backs have a material too - the default tool assumes you have only applied it to the back ! Use the 'force' tool and it should flip the face and materials ? NOTE: If the material is always the same on both sides of a face, then you can simply view in Monochrome, select the problem faces [Tip: use Ctrl to add to the selection, and Shift+Ctrl to remove items from the selection] then use your shortcut key to Reverse the faces en mass. When I say 'context' I mean where the entities are... So faces can be in the model itself or within a group or a component which is placed in the model, or even within another group or component. A group or component 'container' is like a separate SKP within the model... You can edit the 'container' using the context-menu or by doing a double-click on it. Then you are in the container's context and can edit those faces in there. There is no need to 'explode' containers. 'Containers' will separate geometry etc so have important uses...

I selected 'use maximum texture size' ignored the warning and for some strange reason changing tools is no longer a problem. No idea why that should be but everything else was as has been suggested here so I wnet for broke and tada. Just been using sketchup 2013 for a few minutes and normal service has resumed. Clicking about half a dozen times to get a tool change. What is going on?????????

Thanks for your reply - I'm using the same 15" MBP retina with "Best for retina" resolution. Window box text is fine, I guess I'll have to get some glasses!

It would be. So apply a color to the edges and set the line color to By Material.

A manual process that we found was to use the Make Unique Texture. Now it would be to run that in batch on all horizontal faces with an elevation greater than zero. Thoughts?